Historically high levels of private and public debt coupled with already very low short-term interest rates appear to limit the options for stimulative monetary policy in many advanced economies today. One option that has not yet been considered is monetary financing by central banks to boost...

In a fixed-regime setting, it is known since Leeper (1991) that both monetary dominance (mix of active monetary and passive fiscal policies) and fiscal dominance (mix of active fiscal and passive monetary policy) regimes yield a determinate unique equilibrium. This paper shows that in a...

This paper analyses the issue of the dynamics of the TARGET2 system balances during the sovereign debt crisis, when some countries registered a decisive inflow of the central bank liquidity and others showed an outflow. The dynamics in the TARGET2 are here explained as being due to a fall in the...

The present paper contains a brief presentation and analysis, in a historical perspective through the lens of the recent major crises, of the legal framework governing the European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), as well as current developments and challenges ahead. It is structured in three...

The presence of a lower bound of zero on nominal interest rates has important implications for the conduct of optimal monetary policy. Standard rational expectations models can have alternative steady states as well as non-unique laws of motion, i.e. there can be possible sunspot equilibria....

We derive four sets of counterfactual national interest rate paths for the 17 Euro Area countries for the time period 1999 to 2012. They approximate desirable national interest rates countries would have liked to implement if they could still conduct independent monetary policy. We find that...

The paper scrutinizes the reasons for the European debt crisis, the implications for TARGET2 imbalances and options for surplus liquidity absorption within an asymmetric EMU. It is argued that starting from the turn of the millennium diverging fiscal policy paths and diverging unit labor costs...

We study whether the adoption of the Euro and a single monetary policy have brought about a change in the monetary transmission mechanism and between the interactions of monetary policy, fiscal policy and financial stress in the Euro area. We find that the stylized facts of monetary transmission...

This paper makes three points. The first is that external imbalances between Member States are relevant for the performance of a monetary union when the latter is not backed by a strong political commitment and a solid political framework. Eurozone policymakers have ignored these inter-member...

The article is a comment on Alessandrini and Fratianni (2015) (A&F), on how can the euro area cope with inter-regional differences in the absence of fiscal union. A&F develop a model to support their proposals, against which twomain remarks are raised here. First, diverging current account...